Queer Study Reading Key Terms Report

ExtErmination of thE Joyas Gendercide in spanish California

Deborah A. Miranda (Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation, Chumash)

A ttempting to address the many communities from which she spoke, Paula Gunn Allen once asserted: “I cannot do one identity. I’m simply not capable of it.

And it took me years to understand that that’s one of the features of my upbring-

ing. I was raised in a mixed cultural group — mixed linguistic, mixed religion,

mixed race — Laguna itself is that way. So I get really uncomfortable in any kind

of mono-cultural group.”1 Although Allen does not speak specifically of another

community — her lesbian family — in this quotation, her legacy of activism and

writing document the unspoken inclusion of sexual orientation within her list of

identities. Like Allen, my own identity is not monocultural: by blood, I am Esselen

and Chumash (California Native) as well as Jewish, French, and English. I was

born at UCLA Medical Center, raised in trailer parks and rural landscapes, pos-

sess a PhD, and teach at a small, private southern liberal arts university. I am

fluent in English, can read Spanish, and was called to an aliyah at the bat mitzvah

of my partner’s niece. Who am I? Where is home?

In my poetry and my scholarship, I have worked through issues of com-

plex identities for much of my life, primarily those relating to my position as a

mixed-blood woman with an Indian father and European American mother. But

one of the most urgent questions in my life — the intersection of being Indian and

being a lesbian — has always been more complicated, less easily articulated, than

anything else. Here again, Allen’s body of work has been most helpful. In a poem

titled “Some Like Indians Endure,” Allen plays with concepts of just what makes

an Indian an Indian — and asks if those qualities, whatever they are, are neces-

sarily exclusive to Indians. At the heart of this poem is this thought:

I have it in my mind that

dykes are indians

they’re a lot like indians . . .

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they were massacred

lots of times

they always came back

like the gas

like the clouds

they got massacred again. . . .2

This poem illustrates the multiple directions of Allen’s thought: while defending

the concept of Indian as something different and distinguishable from colonizing

cultures around it, Allen simultaneously compares the qualities of being Indian

with those of being lesbian. She comes up with lists of similarities for both identi-

ties, the lengthiness of which overwhelms her ability to keep the two apart. While

Allen recognizes balance and wholeness in both her Laguna and lesbian identities,

this is not necessarily something that completely expresses my own situation.

While researching material for my book “Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir,” however, I came across a page of the ethnologist J. P. Harrington’s field notes that

provided a doorway for me to enter into a conversation about complex identities with

my ancestors.3 Tracing my California Native ancestors from first contact with Span-

ish missionaries through contemporary times, my research required that I immerse

myself in a rich variety of archival resources: correspondence between missionaries

and their supervisors in Spain; mission records of baptism, birth, and death as well

as finances and legal cases; the as-told-to testimonies of missionized Indians both

before, during, and after the mission era; as well as newspapers, family oral his-

tory, photographs, and ethnological and anthropological data from earliest contact

through the “salvage ethnology” era and into the present.4 None of these archival

materials came from unfiltered Indian voices; such records were impossible both

because of their colonizing context and the prevalence of an oral tradition among

California Indians that did not leave textual traces. The difficulties of using non-

Indian archives to tell an Indian story are epic: biases, agendas, cultural pride,

notions of Manifest Destiny, and the desire to “own” history mean that one can

never simply read and accept even the most basic non-Native detail without mul-

tiple investigations into who collected the information, what their motivations were,

who preserved the information and their motivations, the use of rhetorical devices

(like the passive voice so prevalent in missionization histories: “The Missions were

built using adobe bricks” rather than “Indians, often held captive and/or punished

by flogging, built the Missions without compensation”). Learning how to “re-read”

the archive through the eyes of a mixed-blood California Indian lesbian poet and

scholar was an education in and of itself, so the fact that this essay emerges from

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ExtErmination of thE Joyas 255

one short, handwritten piece of information gleaned by Harrington from one of my

ancestors about older ancestors should not be surprising.

To tell the story of this field note, for which I use the shorthand title “Jotos”

(Spanish slang for “queer” or “faggot”), I must pull threads of several stories

together. The field note is like a petroglyph; when I touch it, so much else must

be known, communicated, and understood to see the power within what looks like

a simple inscription, a random bit of Carmel Mission Indian trivia. Once read,

this note opens out into deeper and deeper stories. Some of those stories are full

of grief — like the one that follows — yet they are all essential to possessing this

Figure 1. Harrington field note R73:282B, in Elaine Mills, ed., The Papers of John Peabody Harrington in the Smithsonian Institution, 1907–1957 (White Plains, NY: Kraus International, 1981)

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archival evidence and giving it a truly indigenous reading. When I say “indige-

nous reading,” I mean a reading that enriches Native lives with meaning, survival,

and love, which points to the important role of archival reconstruction in develop-

ing a robust Two-Spirit tradition today.5 In the last two decades, the archaeology of

sexuality and gender has also helped create new ways to use these biased primary

sources, and I hope to pull together the many shards of information available in

order to glimpse what contemporary California Indians might use in our efforts to

reclaim and reinvent ourselves.6 This essay, then, examines methods employed by

the Spaniards to exterminate the joya (the Spanish name for third-gender people);

asks what that extermination meant to California Indian cultures; explores the

survival of this third gender as first joyas, then jotos (Spanish for homosexual,

or faggot); and evaluates the emergence of spiritual and physical renewal of the

ancestral third gender in California Indian Two-Spirit individuals.7 It is both a

personal story and a historical struggle about identity played out in many indig-

enous communities all over the world.

Waging Gendercide 101

Spanish colonizers — from royalty to soldier to padre — believed that American

Indians were intellectually, physiologically, and spiritually immature, if not actual

animals.8 In the area eventually known as California, the genocidal policies of the

Spanish Crown would lead to a severe population crash: numbering one million

at first contact, California Indians plummeted to about ten thousand survivors in

just over one hundred years.9 Part of this massive loss were third-gender people,

who were lost not by “passive” colonizing collateral damage such as disease or

starvation, but through active, conscious, violent extermination. Speaking of the

Chumash people living along the southern coast (my grandmother’s tribal roots),

Pedro Fages, a Spanish soldier, makes clear that the soldiers and priests coloniz-

ing Mexico and what would become California arrived with a deep abhorrence of

what they viewed as homosexual relationships. In his soldier’s memoir, written in

1775, Fages reports:

I have substantial evidence that those Indian men who, both here and

farther inland, are observed in the dress, clothing, and character of

women — there being two or three such in each village — pass as sod-

omites by profession (it being confirmed that all these Indians are much

addicted to this abominable vice) and permit the heathen to practice the

execrable, unnatural abuse of their bodies. They are called joyas, and are

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ExtErmination of thE Joyas 257

held in great esteem. Let this mention suffice for a matter which could not

be omitted, — on account of the bearing it may have on the discussion of

the reduction of these natives, — with a promise to revert in another place

to an excess so criminal that it seems even forbidden to speak its name. . . .

But we place our trust in God and expect that these accursed people will

disappear with the growth of the missions. The abominable vice will be

eliminated to the extent that the Catholic faith and all the other virtues are

firmly implanted there, for the glory of God and the benefit of those poor

ignorants.10

Much of what little we know about joyas (Spanish for “jewels,” as I discuss

below) is limited to observations like that of Fages, choked by Eurocentric val-

ues and mores. The majority of Spanish soldiers and priests were not interested

in learning about California Indian culture and recorded only as much as was

needed to dictate spiritual and corporeal discipline and/or punishment; there are

no known recorded interviews with a joya by either priest or Spaniard, let alone

the salvage ethnologists who arrived one hundred years later. In this section, I

provide an overview of what first contact between joya and Spaniard looked like,

and how that encounter leaves scars to this day in California Indian culture. The

key word here is not, in fact, encounter, but destruction.

Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Mastiffs As I show, while the Spanish priests’ disciplinary methods might be strict and

intolerant, they were at least attempting to deal with joyas and joya relationships in

ways that allowed these Indians to live, albeit marginalized and shamed.

Spanish soldiers had a different, less patient method. They threw the joyas

to their dogs. Shouting the command “Tómalos!” (take them, or sic ’em), the Span-

ish soldiers ordered execution of joyas by specially bred mastiffs and greyhounds.11

The dogs of the conquest, who had already acquired a taste for human flesh (and

were frequently fed live Indians when other food was unavailable), were the colo-

nizer’s weapon of mass destruction.12 In his history of the relationship between

dogs and men, Stanley Coren explains just how efficient these weapons were: “The

mastiffs of that era . . . could weigh 250 pounds and stand nearly three feet at

the shoulder. Their massive jaws could crush bones even through leather armor.

The greyhounds of that period, meanwhile, could be over one hundred pounds

and thirty inches at the shoulder. These lighter dogs could outrun any man, and

their slashing attack could easily disembowel a person in a matter of seconds.”13

Columbus brought dogs along with him on his second journey and claimed that

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one dog was worth fifty soldiers in subduing the Natives.14 On September 23,

1513, the explorer Vasco Nuñez de Balboa came on about forty indigenous men,

all dressed as women, engaged in what he called “preposterous Venus.” He com-

manded his men to give the men as “a prey to his dogges,” and the men were torn

apart alive.15 Coren states matter-of-factly that “these dogs were considered to be

mere weapons and sometimes instruments of torture.”16 By the time the Spaniards

had expanded their territory to California, the use of dogs as weapons to kill or eat

Indians, particularly joyas, was well established.

Was this violence against joyas classic homophobia (fear of people with

same-sex orientation) or gendercide? I argue that gendercide is the correct term.

As Maureen S. Heibert comments:

Gendercide would then be . . . an attack on a group of victims based on

the victims’ gender/sex. Such an attack would only really occur if men or

Figure 2. Theodor de Bry, “Balboa Throws the Indians Who Have Committed the Abominable Crime of Sodomy to Be Torn to Bits by Dogs,” engraving from Bartolomé de las Casas, Narratio regionum Indicarum per Hispanos quosdam deuestatarum verissima (Frankfurt: De Bry and Saurii, 1598)

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women are victimized because of their primary identity as men or women.

In the case of male gendercide, male victims must be victims first and

foremost because they are men, not male Bosnians, Jews, or Tutsis. More-

over, it must be the perpetrators themselves, not outside observers making

ex-poste analyses, who identify a specific gender/sex as a threat and there-

fore a target for extermination.

As such, we must be able to explicitly show that the perpetrators

target a gender victim group based on the victims’ primary identity as either

men or women.17

Or, I must add, as a third gender? Interestingly, although Heibert doesn’t consider

that possibility, her argument supports my own definition of gendercide as an act

of violence committed against a victim’s primary gender identity.

Consider the immediate effect of Balboa’s punishment of the “sodomites”:

when local Indians found out about the executions “upon that filthy kind of men,”

the Indians turned to the Spaniards “as if it had been to Hercules for refuge”

and quickly rounded up all the other third-gender people in the area, “spitting

in their faces and crying out to our men to take revenge of them and rid them out

of the world from among men as contagious beasts.”18 This is not homophobia

(widely defined as irrational fear of or aversion to homosexuals, with subsequent

discrimination against homosexuals); obviously, the Indians were not suddenly

surprised to find joyas in their midst, and dragging people to certain death went

far beyond discrimination or culturally condoned chastisement. This was fear of

death; more specifically, of being murdered. What the local indigenous peoples

had been taught was gendercide, the killing of a particular gender because of their

gender. As Heibert says in her description of gendercide above, “It must be the

perpetrators themselves, not outside observers making ex-poste analyses, who

identify a specific gender/sex as a threat and therefore a target for extermination.”

Now that the Spaniards had made it clear that to tolerate, harbor, or associate with

the third gender meant death, and that nothing could stand against their dogs of

war, the indigenous community knew that demonstrations of acquiescence to this

force were essential for the survival of the remaining community — and both the

community and the Spaniards knew exactly which people were marked for execu-

tion. This tragic pattern in which one segment of indigenous population was sacri-

ficed in hopes that others would survive continues to fester in many contemporary

Native communities where people with same-sex orientation are no longer part

of cultural legacy but feared, discriminated against, and locked out of tribal and

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familial homes. We have mistakenly called this behavior “homophobia” in Indian

Country; to call it gendercide would certainly require rethinking the assimilation

of Euro-American cultural values and the meaning of indigenous community.

Thus the killing of the joyas by Spaniards was, indeed, “part of a coordi-

nated plan of destruction” — but it was only one strategy of gendercide.

(Re-)Naming Father Juan Crespi, part of the 1769 “Sacred Expedition” from Mexico to Alta

California, traveled with an exploration party through numerous Chumash coastal

villages. “We have seen heathen men wearing the dress of women,” he wrote. “We

have not been able to understand what it means, nor what its purpose is; time

and an understanding of the language, when it is learned, will make it clear.”19

Crespi’s willingness to wait for “an understanding of the language” was not, unfor-

tunately, a common sentiment among his countrymen, and although he describes

but does not attempt to name these “men wearing the dress of women,” it wasn’t

long before someone else did.

Erasure of tribal terms, tribal group names, and personal tribal names

during colonization was a strategy used by European colonizers throughout the

Americas. The act of naming was, and still is, a deeply respected and important

aspect of indigenous culture. Although naming ceremonies among North Ameri-

can Indians followed many traditions, varying according to tribe and often even

by band or time period, what has never changed is an acknowledgment of the

sense of power inherent in a name or in the person performing the act of naming,

and the consequent right to produce self-names as utterances of empowerment.

Renaming both human beings and their own names for people or objects in their

world is a political act of dominance. As Stephen Greenblatt writes of Christopher

Columbus’s initial acts of renaming lands whose indigenous names the inhabitants

had already shared with him, “The founding action of Christian imperialism is a

christening. Such a christening entails the cancellation of the native name — the

erasure of the alien, an exorcism, an appropriation, and a gift . . . [it is] the tak-

ing of possession, the conferral of identity.”20 To replace various tribal words for

a Spanish word is indeed an appropriation of sovereignty, a “gift” that cannot be

refused, and perhaps more properly called an “imposition.”

Therefore, when Spaniards arrived in Alta California and encountered a

class of Indians we would now identify as being “third gender,” it makes sense

that in exercising power over the land and inhabitants, one of the first things

the Spaniards did was invent a name for the third-gender phenomenon, a name

applied only to California Indians identified by Spaniards as men who dressed as

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ExtErmination of thE Joyas 261

women and had sex with other men. Interestingly, although Spanish morality dis-

approved of “sodomy” within their own culture and had a collection of words and

euphemisms available to describe “el acto pecado nefando” (“the silent/unspoken

sin”) and its participants (hermafrodita, sodomía, bujarrón, nefandario, maricón,

amujerado), they did not choose to apply these existing Spanish labels to Califor-

nia Indians.21 Instead, overwhelmingly, primary sources use the word joya. As

early as 1775, only six years after Crespi made his observation, the term joya

was already in widespread use. In describing the customs of Indian women in

1775, Fages writes, “The Indian woman takes the little girls with her, that they

may learn to gather seeds, and may accustom themselves to carrying the basket.

In this retinue are generally included some of the worthless creatures which they

call joyas.”22 Although Fages states that “they” (Indians) use the word joyas, the

slippage is obvious when we note that in 1776 or 1777, the missionaries at Mission

San Antonio also reported that

the priests were advised that two pagans had gone into one of the houses of

the neophytes, one in his natural raiment, the other dressed as a woman.

Such a person the Indians in their native language called a joya. Immedi-

ately the missionary, with the corporal and a soldier, went to the house to

see what they were looking for, and there they found the two in an unspeak-

ably sinful act. They punished them, although not so much as deserved. The

priest tried to present to them the enormity of their deed. The pagan replied

that that joya was his wife . . . along the Channel of Santa Barbara . . . many

joyas are found.23

In precontact California, the linguist Leanne Hinton writes, “Over a hun-

dred languages were spoken here, representing five or more major language fami-

lies and various smaller families and linguistic isolates.”24 Adding in estimates

of hundreds of different dialects, it seems clear that every California tribe would

have had its own word for third-gendered people, not the generic joya that Spanish

records give us. For example, at Mission San Diego, Father Boscana describes the

biological men who dressed and lived as women or, as he put it, those who were

accustomed to “marrying males with males.” He writes, “Whilst yet in infancy

they were selected, and instructed as they increased in years, in all the duties of

the women — in their mode of dress — of walking, and dancing; so that in almost

every particular, they resembled females. . . . To distinguish this detested race at

this mission, they were called ‘Cuit,’ in the mountains, ‘Uluqui,’ and in other parts,

they were known by the name of ‘Coias.’ ”25 Joya, then, is a completely new term

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and must have been fashioned one way or another by the Spaniards, perhaps from

an indigenous word that sounded like “joyas” or as commentary on the joyas’ fond-

ness for women’s clothing, jewelry, and hairstyles (Spanish explorers in Mexico

called hummingbirds joyas voladores, or “flying jewels”).26 It seems doubtful that

the Spaniards would retain a beautiful name like “jewel” to describe what they

saw as the lowest, most bestial segment of the Indian community unless it was

meant as a kind of sarcasm to enact a sense of power and superiority over the

third-gendered people. James Sandos has some sense of this as well, writing that

“the Spanish called them (jewels), a term that may have been derisive in Span-

ish culture but inadvertently conveyed the regard with which such men were held

in Chumash culture.”27 By “derisive,” Sandos perhaps means that the Spaniards

were making fun of what they perceived to be a ridiculous and shameful status.

Another possibility for the origins of joya lies in a linguistic feat, the pun.

For years, people have assumed that the California town La Jolla (the double l in

Spanish is pronounced as a y) is simply a misspelling of joya. However, Nellie Van

de Grift Sanchez writes: “La Jolla, a word of doubtful origin, said by some persons

to mean a ‘pool,’ by others to be from hoya, a hollow surrounded by hills, and by

still others to be a possible corruption of joya, a ‘jewel.’ The suggestion has been

made that La Jolla was named from caves situated there which contain pools.”28

Yet another similar sounding Spanish word is olla, which means jar or vessel.

What all these things have in common — a pool, a hollow, a vessel — is that each

is a kind of container, a receptacle. Ethnologists and Spaniards alike agree that

the joya’s role as a biological male living as a female meant, among many other

things, joyas were sexually active with “normative” men as the recipients of anal

sex. In fact, a joya would never consider having sex with another joya — this was

not forbidden, simply unthinkable — so this may truly have been a case of “I’m not

joya but my boyfriend is!”

All in all, the renaming of the joyas was not likely meant to be a com-

pliment, but strangely enough, it does reflect the respect with which precontact

California Natives regarded this gender. Perhaps, as with the word Indian, joya

has strong potential for reappropriation and a new signification of value. By choos-

ing this word and not one of their established homolexemes, this act of renaming

reinforces the notion that Spanish priests and soldiers sensed something else — an

indefinable gender role, a “new” class of people? — going on here, something more

or different than the deviant “sodomites” of their own culture.

On an individual basis, the changing of California Indian personal names

is recorded in the mission baptism records.29 An Indian from Cajats was baptized

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ExtErmination of thE Joyas 263

at Mission Santa Barbara in 1819, stripped of the name Liuixucat and renamed

Vitor Maria.30 Yautaya from Chucumne, near Mission San Jose, became Robus-

tiano in 1823.31 In 1832 an Indian from Liuayto, near the San Francisco Mis-

sion, came in with the name Coutesi but was baptized Viador.32 These same three

people, brought into missions for baptism at ages thirty-two, thirty-three, and

forty-five, respectively, had notations on their baptism records of another kind of

naming: “armafrodita o joya,” “joya,” or “joya o amugereado.” The padres applied

Spanish words meaning “hermaphrodite” or “effeminate,” as well as (in all three

cases) joya. Vitor Maria died in 1821, just two years after baptism. Robustiano

died in 1832, nine years after baptism. There is no death record for Viador, who

may have been one of the many mission runaways. Interestingly, joya or other gen-

der identifiers do not appear on the death records available, unlike the baptisms.

Had Vitor and Robustiano learned to hide their gender, or was it simply accepted

and no longer noted? It seems most likely that in the interest of survival (coming

into the missions as grown adults, in this late era, usually meant starvation and/

or capture), a joya would at least attempt a form of assimilation such as assum-

ing male dress and work roles. However, as Sandos comments, “If contemporary

study is any guide, these berdache, especially when they entered the missions,

were important links between the new, European-imposed culture and traditional

Chumash ways.”33 The entrance of older joyas, raised to revere and preserve cul-

tural and spiritual continuity, into California missions where Native culture was

disparaged and forbidden, must have provided a powerful infusion of Native lan-

guage, religion, and values that contributed to or delayed assimilation. (Indeed,

on a larger scale, tremendously high death rates combined with perilously low

birth rates meant a constant “restocking” of the missions with “wild” Indians cap-

tured from farther and farther away as time went on, creating a situation where the

Spanish language and European farming/herding skills were not passed from one

generation to the next but had to be retaught to each incoming wave. This break-

down in transference of culture actually allowed California Natives a chance to

retain more indigenous culture, albeit at great personal loss.)

Punishment, Regendering, and Shame The Spanish priests, viewing themselves in loco parentis, approached the joya’s

behaviors through the twin disciplinary actions of physical and spiritual punish-

ment and regendering. Both of these terms are euphemisms for violence. The con-

sequences for being a joya — whether dressing as a woman, doing women’s work,

partnering with a normative male, or actually being caught in a sexual liaison with

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a man — included flogging with a leather whip (braided leather typically as thick

as a fist), time in the stocks, and corma (a kind of hobbling device that restricted

movement but allowed the Indian to work). Enforced, extended rote repetition of

unfamiliar prayers on knees, verbal harassment and berating, ridicule, and sham-

ing in front of the joya’s community were other forms of discipline. The Ten Com-

mandments were beaten into Indians who spoke fragmented Spanish by priests

who spoke little if any Indian language, so misunderstandings were frequent and

devastating. In a culture where corporal punishment was unknown, even for chil-

dren, the Spaniards quickly learned that “the punishing of Indians with lashes . . .

in the case of the old and married produces shame and sarza of mind, so that

at times the victims die of chagrin and melancholy, or desert to the mountains,

or, if women, are rejected by their husbands.”34 As joyas were treated like women

by their tribal communities, married or partnered to “normative” men, they too

would be subject to rejection by their partners or community. Father Boscana

wrote that joyas, “being more robust than the women, were better able to per-

form the arduous duties required of the wife, and for this reason, they were often

selected by the chiefs and others, and on the day of the wedding a grand feast was

given.”35 Often, joyas were driven from their communities by tribal members at

the instigation of the priests and made homeless; this, after a lifetime of esteem

and high status, must have been a substantial blow to both physical well-being and

emotional health.

In one case, Father Palóu described a group of natives visiting at Mission

Santa Clara; soldiers and priests noticed that one native among the women was

actually a man. Father Palóu wrote:

Among the gentile [Indian] women (who always worked separately and

without mixing with the men) there was one who, by the dress, which was

decorously worn, and by the heathen headdress and ornaments displayed,

as well as the manner of working, sitting, etc., had all the appearances of

a woman, but judging by the face and the absence of breasts, though old

enough for that, they concluded that he must be a man, but that he passed

himself off always for a woman and always went with them and not the

men. Taking off his aprons they found that he was more ashamed than if

he really had been a woman. They kept him there three days, making him

sweep the plaza, but giving him plenty to eat. But he remained very cast

down and ashamed. After he had been warned that it was not right for

him to go about dressed as a woman and much less thrust himself in with

them, as it was presumed that he was sinning with them, they let him go.

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ExtErmination of thE Joyas 265

He immediately left the Mission and never came back to it, but from the

converts it was learned that he was still in the villages of the gentiles and

going about as before, dressed as a woman.36

Close reading (“thrust himself in”) suggests that the priest and soldiers completely

misunderstood the situation, and assumed that this man was “sinning” — that

is, sneaking into the women’s work area dressed as a woman to flirt or have sex

with them. The idea that a man would choose to dress and work as a woman with

other women — and that the community accepted and in fact benefited from that

choice — was inconceivable to the Spaniards. Probably because of this misunder-

standing, this joya was able to escape and find another community (at least tem-

porarily). After a taste of regendering by the Spaniards, no doubt even unfamiliar

villages looked better than remaining with one’s own family and friends. At this

point in the missionization process, leaving for life with the “gentiles” was still

a possibility.

As time went on and escapes like the one above became less viable, joyas

trapped in the missions or brought in as adults by raiding parties suffered from

a kind of social dislocation that must have been deeply troubling for individu-

als accustomed to a rich but specialized community network. Precontact native

Californian societies operated under a gender separation that generally kept men

and women working at separate tasks, away from the opposite sex, most of the

day. Women had their work areas and were accustomed to withdrawing to them

to weave, harvest, process and prepare food, care for children, and so on. Joyas

were always a part of this women’s world and did not cross over into the men’s

territory. The mission priests, however, demanded that joyas spend all their time

in “masculine” company, doing “masculine” work, rather than in the company

of women and benefiting from the camaraderie, friendships, and sense of worth

found there. Aside from the emotional shock of being cut off from friends and com-

munity, joyas were also faced with what, to them, was an inappropriate mixing of

genders. In a culture where work and play were gendered activities (although not

necessarily gendered as the Spanish would think of them), being forcibly placed in

the “wrong” group would have been both extremely uncomfortable and unfamiliar

for joyas. Remember that Father Palóu remarked of the joya found in his mission,

“Taking off his aprons they found that he was more ashamed than if he really had

been a woman.” In a kind of involuntary gender-reassignment, joyas were made

to dress as men, act as men, and consort with men in contexts for which they

had little if any experience. For the “normative” men, having a joya among them

all day and night — let alone someone stripped of appropriate clothing, status,

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and respect — must have also been disturbing and a further disruption of cultural

signification. Women, too, would have noticed and missed the presence of joyas

within that smaller, interdependent feminine community.

As a consequence of this regendering, renaming, and murder, one of

the joya’s most important responsibilities, on which the well-being of the tribe

depended, was completely disrupted; prohibited by the priests, the complex and

deeply spiritual position of undertaker became a masterful example of coloniza-

tion by appropriation.

Replacement Most research on the indigenous third gender agrees that a person living this role

had particular responsibilities to the community, especially ceremonial and reli-

gious events and tasks.37 In California, death, burial, and mourning rituals were

the exclusive province of the joyas; they were the undertakers of their communities.

As the only members of California Indian communities who possessed the neces-

sary training to touch the dead or handle burials without endangering themselves

or the community, the absence of joyas in California Indian communities must have

constituted a tremendously disturbing crisis.38 As Sandra E. Hollimon states, “Per-

haps most profoundly, the institution of Catholic burial programs and designated

mission cemeteries would have usurped the traditional responsibilities of the ’aqi

[Ventureno Chumash word for joya]. The imposition of Catholic practices in com-

bination with a tremendously high death rate among mission populations would

undoubtedly have contributed to the disintegration for the guild.”39 It is hard to

overstate the chaos and panic the loss of their undertakers must have produced for

indigenous Californians. The journey to the afterlife was known to be a prescribed

series of experiences with both male and female supernatural entities, and the ’aqi,

with their male-female liminality, were the only people who could mediate these

experiences. Since the female (earth, abundance, fertility) energies were so power-

ful, and since the male (Sun, death-associated) energies were equally strong, the

person who dealt with that moment of spiritual and bodily crossing over between

life and death must have specially endowed spiritual qualities and powers, not to

mention long-term training and their own quarantined tools. Baskets used to scoop

up the earth of a grave, for example, were given to the ’aqi by the deceased person’s

relatives as partial payment for burial services, but also because they could never

again be used for the life-giving acts of cooking or gathering.40

The threshold of death was the realm of the ’aqi, and no California Indian

community was safe or complete without that mediator. Asserting that undertakers

were exclusively ’aqi or postmenopausal women (also called ’aqi), Hollimon specu-

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lates that perhaps “the mediation between death and the afterlife, and between

human and supernatural realms, was entrusted by the Chumash to individuals who

could not be harmed by symbolic pollution of the corpse, and who were no longer (or

never had been) capable of giving birth.”41 Hollimon’s archaeological work allows

us to understand that the “third gender” status of joyas may have been extended,

in some fashion, to postmenopausal women as well, should they desire to pursue a

career as undertaker. Another strong possibility is that elderly women stepped into

the role of undertaker when persecution reduced the availability of joyas.

With the loss of the ’aqi, then, came an instant and urgent need for some

kind of spiritual protection and ritualization of death. This would have suited the

Roman Catholic Church, which had more than enough ritual available — and

priests were anxious to institute new rituals to replace what they regarded as pagan

practices. While founding the San Francisco Mission, Fray Palóu wrote, “Those

who die as pagans, they cremate; nor have we been able to stop this,” indicating

that burial — as tribes farther south practiced — was the only mortuary practice

considered civilized.42 At these same cremations, in reference to funeral rituals,

Palóu noted that “there are some old women who repeatedly strike their breast

with a stone. . . . they grieve much and yell quite a bit.”43 It would have been dif-

ficult to tell an elderly joya dressed as a woman from an elderly woman, if one did

not know of the connection between joyas and the death ceremony; in fact, years

later, when Harrington interviewed Maria Solares, a Chumash survivor of Mission

Santa Ynez (and one of his major consultants), she told him that all undertakers

(“aqi”) were women, strong enough to carry bodies and dig deep graves, and that

the role was passed from mother to daughter.44 Harrington pointed out that the

Ineseño word for joto was also ’aqi, that it was strange that “women should be so

strong to lift bodies,” and Solares agreed, though still puzzled.45 It seems that

by the mid-1930s, the memory of ’aqi as beloved members of the community no

longer matched Solares’s cultural understanding of joto — the long-term damage

of homophobia was substantial even in linguistic terms, let alone human terms. It

is not hard for me to imagine my ancestors, fearing for their spiritual well-being,

their loved ones, and what remained of their communities, turning to Catholicism

out of desperation. As the diseases and violence of colonization took their toll,

communities were under intense pressure about the many burials or cremations to

be carried out. The turn to, and dependence on, Catholic burial rituals was a form

of coerced conversion that had nothing to do with Christianity, and everything to

do with fear.

Through these methods, then — murder, renaming, regendering, and

replacement — the joya gendercide was carried out. The destruction seems to

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cover every aspect of joya identity and survival. Yet, I argue, joya identity did not

disappear entirely.

surviving Gendercide

How could joyas survive such devastation? Where are they? What is their role in

contemporary California Indian life?

First, it is important to note that mission records show baptisms of adult

joyas as late as 1832, almost sixty years after Fages expressed his outrage in 1775.

“Late arrivals” to the mission — adult Indians who, having lived most of their lives

as “wild” Indians, were rounded up and brought in for forced baptism — actually

slowed the missionization process considerably. In combination with the low life

expectancy of mission-born children (two to seven years), a strong influx of adult

indigenous cultural practices probably also kept the role of joya from fading away

as quickly as might otherwise be expected (allowing younger Indians to witness or

know joyas, as well as pass on that information orally to future generations).46

Second, just as the extermination of California Indians, while extensive,

has been exaggerated as complete, so too is the idea that joyas could be gen-

dercided out of existence. A joya’s conception does not depend on having a joya

parent, unlike normative male and female sexes, who depend on both male and

female for conception; as long as enough of the normative population remains alive and able to bear children, the potential for joya gender to emerge in some of

those children also remains. To exterminate joyas entirely, all California Indian

people would have had to be killed, down to the very last; thus it makes sense that

during missionization and postsecularization, as in the past, joyas rose out of the

general population spontaneously and regularly. However, those joya had virtually

no choice but to hide their gender. Like Pueblo tribes who took their outlawed reli-

gious ceremonies underground until it was safe to practice more openly (although

outsiders are understandably rarely allowed to partake or witness the ceremonies),

joyas in California may have taken a similar tactic, removing themselves from cer-

emonial roles with religious connotations and hiding out in the general population.

Sadly, the traditional blend of spiritual and sexual energy that was a source of joya

empowerment suffered an abrupt division; as time passed and the few surviving

elder joyas passed on, younger joyas would have been forced to function without

role models, teachers, spiritual advisers, or even — eventually — oral stories of

their predecessors. Walter Williams reports that he “could not find any traces of

a joya gender in oral traditions among contemporary California Indians from mis-

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sionized tribes,” but adds, “that does not mean that a recognized and respected

status for berdache no longer existed, or that same-sex behavior vanished. To find

evidence of such continuity is extremely difficult.”47

Williams outlines three major obstacles to finding such evidence: inability

of surviving joyas to use written language (or refusal, once it was introduced),

resulting in a lack of documentation; the need for extremely specialized and cul-

turally sensitive oral ethnographies by contemporary researchers with some way

to take part in community conversations; and the backlash against earlier kinds of

research that left indigenous peoples distrustful and unwilling to share sensitive

material.

Williams’s research in South America suggests that a division of the third

gender occurred there, perhaps as a conscious effort to “remove the berdaches from

a public institutionalized role, to protect them from the Spanish wrath,” result-

ing in two new, distinct groups, each with distinct roles.48 One group are those

who identify as “homosexual” — males whose preferred sexual partners are men,

but who often marry women later in life to attain acceptance and status within

their birth families. This group does not participate in any ceremonial or religious

activity. The other group consists of a switch from traditional shamanism, with its

association with male-male sex, to powerful, oftentimes physically androgynous,

shamans or spiritual leaders whose birth sex is female and who identify as women

(often married with children, but just as often unmarried or postmenopausal). “So

strong was the association of femininity with spiritual power that if the androgy-

nous males could not fill the role,” Williams writes, “then the Indians would use

the next most spiritually powerful persons. In striving for effective spirituality,

they responded in a creative way to Spanish genocidal pressures.”49 By dividing

sexual and spiritual power, indigenous people were able to deflect some of the

violence visited on those original individuals yet maintain living connections with

essential powers of life and death. Neither a traditional nor an ideal solution, such

a split was nonetheless necessary for tribal survival.

I suggest that a similar survival strategy evolved among missionized Cali-

fornia Indians: that those people who may have identified as or been identified

as joyas experienced the spiritual-sexual split in one of two ways: they became

either closeted same-sex jotos who engaged in secret sexual relationships with

other men, or they became adult male or female members of the community with

important roles as caretakers and “grave-tenders” of Native culture who chose to

remain single — that is, unmarried to normative genders — throughout life. Traces

of a split joya gender, I argue, can be found from the time of the gendercide to the

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present day, if not in our oral traditions then in the libraries and documentation of

our colonizers, as well as in our own Two-Spirit bodies. Two examples illustrative

of this split are outlined below.

Kitsepawit Fernando Librado, a Chumash man born early in 1839, became

a primary consultant for Harrington.50 Librado lived his long life as a person who

adapted from someone who might have been ’aqi (or joya) in an earlier time to

what seems to be a kind of cultural caretaker, collecting and preserving stories,

technologies, and histories. Born at the end of mission life into the chaos of sec-

ularization, Librado would not have been allowed to become a joya, even if he

could have found enough of a community to support him in his efforts. However,

Librado fulfilled many of the spiritual roles of a joya: in oral material gathered by

Harringon, Librado comments frequently on his intense desire to learn as much

about his “dying” culture’s knowledge as possible, tracking down Chumash doc-

tors and quizzing Chumash women about plants, wild harvesting, and how to pre-

pare traditional foods, ceremonies, and songs.51 Librado traveled widely to attend

Chumash dances, sings, storytellings, or ceremonies to observe and learn; signifi-

cantly, his hunger for knowledge encouraged him to cross male and female gender

boundaries, not limiting his research by labels such as “men’s work” or “women’s

work.” Librado never married, never had children, and never spoke of having ever

been partnered.

Even when discouraged or chastised by other Indian people, Librado per-

sisted in his own form of research. Repeatedly throughout his narrative in Breath

of the Sun, he speaks of scenes like this: “Francisca . . . asked me why I wanted

to learn the Swordfish Dance songs, and then she said to me: ‘You should aban-

don the idea.’ I replied: ‘What is the matter with it?’ and Francisca told me: ‘It is

not good. You better abandon the idea.’ ”52 But Librado was persistent and well

versed in Indian etiquette; gathering up valuable gifts of food and drink, he visited

another home: “Donociana and Nolberto knew the Indian dances too. . . . I once

went over to Donociana’s house, taking with me some marrow, guts, tripe, and

other inner things of a beef, along with some bread and wine. I wanted to learn the

Swordfish Dance. After the meal I asked her to teach me the old dances, saying,

‘for you are the only ones left who know the old dances.’ Donociana began to cry,

and I left saying nothing more.”53 Such refusal and grief among his own people

must have been difficult to bear, yet Librado continued collecting knowledge and

storing it away. While Librado was not able to act as an actual undertaker, tend-

ing to dead bodies, departing spirits, and their final needs, he did, in many ways,

act as an undertaker for his culture, gathering indigenous cultural knowledge and

caring for those scattered pieces. As traditional joyas protected the people and

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community through their tending of the dead, so Librado protected his people

and community through his tending of what culture the dead had left behind. He

had no idea that someone like Harrington would come along; Librado was simply

compelled to care for his culture.

Remember that in Librado’s time, it was easy to believe that this world had

come to an end. Anglos and Indians alike were under the influence of the notion of

Manifest Destiny, which preached the inevitable and imminent death of all things

Indian. Ultimately, Librado told much of what he knew to Harrington, knowing

that it would be recorded — both in writing and on early sound recordings — and

preserved, perhaps, until descendants came to claim it. In other words, Librado

gave the remnants of his culture — all that he could gather in his long and deter-

mined lifetime — a good burial, a good place to rest, rather than let the pieces lie

scattered all over the ground, without prayers, ritual, proper care. While I can’t do

more than speculate about Librado’s decision to remain unmarried and without

children, when considered together with his caretaking, his chosen role seems to

be that of an ’aqi who adapted to the times in order to best serve his community’s

spiritual needs. In fact, when Maria Solares from Santa Ynez discussed the word

’aqi with Harrington, she told him that Librado was ’aqi, meaning homosexual:

“He stayed with men and would go crawling to other men in the night.”54

Here we see clearly the spiritual-sexual split of the joya role; Solares knew

about queerness, and she knew about undertakers, but until Harrington pointed

out that the two roles shared the same word, she did not realize the connection

between the two. At the same time, Solares, by her use of what she thought of as

the word for faggot, indicates that she knew something of Librado’s more private

life that, together with his efforts as a cultural caretaker, seem to point to his liv-

ing adaptation of the traditional ’aqi role.

We glimpse the sexual side of the joya split in those field notes from Har-

rington mentioned early in this essay, in two brief comments by his consultant

Isabel Meadows, from Mission Carmel. Following are my transliteration and trans-

lation of those notes.

Transliteration:

Isabel

Mar. 1934

Estefana Real tenia muchos maridos. Her children had many fathers — eran

joteras las Viejas antes.

Isabel Mar.[19]37 understands joteras above to mean that the Viejas

eran muy macheras. But no, the real reason Isabel used jotera in 34 was

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because la Estefana had a son, Victor Acedo, who was joto. Nuca decir

nada la vieja Estefana, o no savia quezez [quizas?], que su hijo, Victor, era

joto. This was why in [19]34 Isabel spoke of Estefana as muy jotera, she

had a son who was joto.55

Translation:

Isabel

Mar. 1934

Estefana Real had many husbands. Her children had many fathers — they

were joteras, the old ladies before.

Isabel March [19]37 understands “joteras” above to mean that the old

women were very macho. But no, the real reason Isabel used “jotera” in

’34 was because Estefana had a son, Victor Acedo, who was a faggot.56

The old lady Estefana never said nothing, or she didn’t know, maybe, that

her son, Victor, was a faggot. This was why in ’34 Isabel spoke of Estefana

as very macho, she had a son who was a faggot.

These are not just names out of an ethnologist’s old field notes, nor are

these details simply interesting, if belated, gossip from a tribal consultant. I am

related to Isabel Meadows by marriage.57 In addition, Estefana Real was born in

1809 at the Carmel Mission; her sister, Josefa “Chepa” Real, born in 1812, was

my great-great-great-great grandmother. Victor Acedo, my cousin, is the “joto”

under discussion.

It’s true what Isabel said about Estefana Real — she had at least nine,

possibly eleven, children by at least several men whose names are sometimes

recorded, sometimes not. She began having babies in 1825 and kept it up through

1848. Victor, born “Nestor Bitoreano Antonio,” was given the surname Real at

his baptism on March 4, 1846.58 Fray Doroteo Ambris officiated. Estefana did

not declare Victor’s paternity at the baptism (the father’s name is listed as “incog-

nito”), but Padre Ambris noted “Parvulo [child] de Razon Real” — indicating that

the father was “de Razon” or “of reason,” meaning European, as well as “of Real,”

the priest.59 The sketchy material is normal for this time period; during the post-

secularization era of the California missions, life was a gamble and chaos was the

everyday challenge. Steven W. Hackel, a scholar who has studied Mission San

Carlos extensively, writes:

By 1833, only about 220 Indians lived at San Carlos. The most skilled

and independent had left or died. An untold number had never been born

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because of the sterility of many San Carlos residents. Of those at the mis-

sions, nearly half were under age twenty and a third were over forty, leav-

ing just about two dozen men between the ages of twenty and thirty-nine.

Too small to be an economically productive community, the mission had

become a decaying congregation of families and dependents, an increas-

ingly dilapidated place where people often competed with one another for

food.60

Estefana, however, was a fighter from a long line of survivors. Her father, Fruc-

tuoso Jose Cholom, had served as a mission alcalde prior to secularization, which

was a kind of overseer, or boss. With his wife, Hyginia, Fructuoso received a small

parcel of land during secularization in 1835, one of very few Indians given this

opportunity.61 Fructuoso lived on this land until his death in 1845, when Victor

was about a year old. By 1850, Hackel states, his widow may have been joined

on the land by her daughter Estefana, and presumably her surviving underage

children, including Victor, who would have been four years old. Some of the land

was sold to Joaquin Gonzalez, an emigrant from Chile who had been a soldier at

the Presidio in Monterey. The contract carried the agreement that Hyginia and

Estefana (and presumably any of her surviving underage children) could continue

to live on the land until Hyginia’s death. By 1853, when Victor was seven, Hyginia

had sold the remainder of her husband’s rancho to Gonzalez, and around the same

time, Estefana married the Chilean. Like several other Indian women, only mar-

riage to a non-Indian secured what was left of Estefana’s inheritance.

So it is possible for me to imagine a little of Victor Acedo’s life. Born into a

postholocaust Indian world, living in poverty, illegitimate in the Church’s eyes, he

grew up with his strong Indian grandmother Hyginia, her two powerful daughters

Josefa (a.k.a. Chepa) and Teodosia as his aunts, on a small chunk of his indigenous

land secured for him by his mother’s marriage to a former soldier at the former mis-

sion. No wonder Isabel told Harrington those old women were “joteras” — mean-

ing, I suspect, “tough broads”! Now that I know more about Estefana, I can see

how Isabel used that word as a sign of her admiration, as a way to praise those

“Viejas antes,” those old women before us, troublemakers who never stopped fight-

ing, never stopped loving, never stopped trying to survive, and never gave up their

identity or their relationship with their homeland.

Of course, Estefana “never said nothing” about her son’s sexual choices.

First, her father’s position as alcalde indicates that, premissionization, his fam-

ily was probably already in a position of authority. Inherited family status often

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replicated itself within the missions, with formerly high-status families gravitating

toward whatever new positions of authority were available to Indians. These same

high-status families also retained much of the traditional knowledge, language,

and cultural information, in part because they were more able to protect them-

selves and preserve the individuals possessing this information. Fructuoso came

from a time when knowledge of joyas, by any name, was common; when men of

high status sought out joyas as wives because of their reputations as hard workers;

when to be a joya was a position of high status in and of itself, no matter what sta-

tus the joya’s family of origin. Fructuoso would have taught his daughters this, as

well as much more about their indigenous culture, while striving to reinvent that

culture in a world undergoing the worst devastation imaginable.62

Second, it is clear that everyone involved in the story, from Isabel the story-

teller to the three Real sisters, Victor, and even Harrington, who, after all, went

back to Isabel a year later for clarification, all understood that the word joto was

not a compliment. The infliction of homophobia as a result of earlier gendercide

on California Indians was deeply fixed well before Isabel’s comments and was no

doubt something Victor himself was forced to deal with all of his life.

Except for a brief mention in another Harrington field note from May 1936

in which Isabel recalls Victor Acedo working as a cook for a man named Snively,

I don’t know what happened to Victor.63 Records from 1850 to 1900 are scarce

for Indian people, especially with the Catholic missions in limbo between Spain,

Mexico, and the United States, and especially for someone who would not show up

on Church registers as a groom or father. This short note is all we know about him:

his name, his mother’s resistant behavior, his sexual orientation, the implication

that for a woman to be strong implied a mixing of masculine and feminine energy.

But Victor’s presence gives me hope; hearing via Isabel that he grew to adulthood,

and knowing who his mother was, allows me to imagine him as having, at the very

least, a sense of self complicated not just by shame but by some knowledge of his

historical and cultural inheritance. As the sexual side of the spiritual-sexual split-

ting of the joya role, jotos like Victor survived — quietly, and at great cost, but they

survived.

reemergence of Joyas as “two-spirited” Peoples

Looking forward now, it is clear to me that indigenous California third-gender

people are reemerging from attempted gendercide, which we survived by per-

forming a division between spiritual and sexual roles in our communities. We are

reemerging as contemporary Two-Spirit people. This name, Two-Spirit, allows the

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reunion of spiritual and sexual roles into a whole and undivided gender role, a role

still needed in human society. Claiming our roles as the caretakers of culture and

spirituality, like Fernando Librado, as well as our sexual selves, like Victor Acedo,

we focus our attentions on the nurturance of our communities.

One contemporary example of a Two Spirit is L. Frank Manriquez, a

Tongva/Ajachmen artist and tribal activist. She is a board member of the Califor-

nia Indian Basketweavers Association, the Advocates for Indigenous California

Language Survival, and the Native California Network, organizations involved in

the preservation and revival of Native Californian cultures through conferences,

workshops, traditional arts practice, and language immersion camps, as well as

chronicling collections of Native Californian art. Manriquez is also a respected

artist in several genres (drawing, painting, soapstone carving, and basketweaving).

Her book of drawings, Acorn Soup, earned her the title of “the Indian Gary Lar-

sen,” and she was coeditor of First Families: A Photographic History of California

Indians, widely regarded as a powerful testimony to the continuation of California

Indian culture.64 I believe that what Manriquez has been doing is deeply tradi-

tional and part of the reemerging joya or Two-Spirit renaissance: as a person with

the energy of two genders balancing within her, and conscious of the value of her

work with the dead to nurture the living, Manriquez performs the ancient role

of undertaker as so many specially trained indigenous people have done before

her — but she is doing it without that careful training and so must find her own

way. “Because our people are considered extinct, it’s hard to get information,”

Manriquez writes. “So there’s really nobody you can go to except for your dreams,

and your prayers, and your wishes, and your longings.”65 In 2001 Manriquez wrote

that she had felt compelled to travel to museums outside the United States where

artifacts from California Indian tribes had been taken. Led by her dreams (and

a timely award from the Fund for Folk Culture), Manriquez visited the Musée de

L’Homme, where “I walked into this room where there were boxes and boxes and

boxes and boxes of my people’s lives, and they were like muffled crying coming

from these shelves and these boxes, and it was just heart-breaking. . . . but these

pieces and I became friends. I tried to touch as much as I possibly could.”66 For

California Indians, as for many indigenous peoples, touching artifacts stolen from

Native communities has connotations both deeply spiritual and terribly dangerous.

“There was a piece that really worried me when I photographed it,” Manriquez

says. “It was on display in the Musée de L’Homme and it said specifically, ‘grave

item.’ ”67 Knowing that contact with the dead, or objects buried with the dead, was

a hazardous spiritual act that could affect her well-being and balance, Manriquez

was torn between the desire to reclaim what little was left of her culture and a

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duty to follow traditional prohibitions set in place long before that culture became

endangered. Ultimately, she decided, “Well, I may burn in Indian hell, but this is

really important for me to see this, for me and my people.” Later, showing slides of

this and other burial items to a group that included the Cahuilla elder Catherine

Saubel, Manriquez was again unsure about her choice, this time for reasons of

community disapproval; “I was incredibly worried because here’s a grave item

and I’m dealing with it. But [Catherine] looked at me and she understood what I

was saying and what I was doing in bringing it back and showing people, and so I

could carry on other traditions without fear of long term reprisal.”68

Unmarried, without children, Manriquez has said that her work is her leg-

acy: reclaiming indigenous knowledge and passing it on to the coming generations.

She acknowledges that reclamation work is spiritually risky: “There aren’t many

of us who will endure museums because sometimes there are things in there that

you should not touch, you should not see, you should not be near, and so we risk a

lot going to recover.”69 I do not believe that it is a coincidence that Manriquez also

identifies as a woman whose primary sexual and emotional relationships are with

other women; to deal with the powerful energy of the dead, she must also be able

to draw on the creative energy inherent in sexual existence. When asked if I could

include her Two-Spirit identity in this discussion, Manriquez replied, “I have no

problem being out there,” indicating that it is as much a part of her work as any

research or artwork.70

Many other Two-Spirit Indians currently serve the recovery of their indig-

enous communities via the spiritual and cultural arts of poetry, fiction, visual

arts, basketweaving, tribal leadership, and environmental activism; these people

also assert and live their sexual identities as what Euro-Americans call queer. In

fact, Janice Gould (Concow) has described the work that indigenous women poets

like Chrystos (Menominee), Joy Harjo (Mvskoke), and Beth Brant (Mohawk) do in

grieving, honoring, and writing our historical losses in terms of “a resurrection of

history through writing. . . . This writing, I would say, amounts almost to an act of

exhumation” — a statement that reinforces the necessity of the Two-Spirit involve-

ment in survival of Native culture and communities.71

reconstructing a spiritual, Community-oriented role for two-spirit People

In conclusion, I suggest that contemporary California Two-Spirits are the right-

ful descendents of joyas.72 Two-Spirit people did not cease to exist, they did not

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ExtErmination of thE Joyas 277

cease to be born, simply because the Spaniards killed our joya ancestors. This, in

fact, is a crucial point: the words gay or lesbian do not fully define a Two-Spirited

person, because those labels are based on an almost exclusively sexual paradigm

inherited from a nonindigenous colonizing culture. The Chumash ’aqi, or joyas,

fulfilled important roles as spiritual community leaders, so although genocide and

gendercide worked to erase their bodies, neither their spirits nor the indigenous

community’s spiritual needs could be murdered. This is what comes down to us as

Two-Spirit people: the necessity of our roles as keepers of a dual or blended gender

that holds male and female energy in various mixtures and keeps the world bal-

anced. Although Two-Spirit people often had children in the past, and continue to

do so in the present, and will into the future, we do not expect or train our children

to follow in our footsteps. A Two-Spirit person is born regardless of biological gene-

alogy. Thus we will always be with you. We are you. We are not outsiders, some

other community that can be wiped out. We come from you, and we return to you.

Simply identifying as both Indian and gay does not make a person Two-

Spirit, although it can be a courageous and important step; the danger of that

assumption elides Two-Spirit responsibilities as well as the social and cultural

needs of contemporary indigenous communities in relation to such issues as sui-

cide rates, alcoholism, homelessness, and AIDS. What steps can we take to recon-

struct our role in the larger indigenous community? I look back at this research

on my family and find guidance, examples, strategies, and lessons that converge

around six key actions:

1. reclaim a name for ourselves;

2. reclaim a place for ourselves within our tribal communities (which

means serious education and presence to counteract centuries of homopho-

bia — a literary presence, a practical presence, and a working presence);

3. resist violence against ourselves as individuals and as a community

within Native America;

4. work to determine what our roles as liminal beings might be in contem-

porary Native and national contexts;

5. work to reclaim our histories from the colonizer’s records even as we

continue to know and adapt our lives to contemporary circumstances and

needs; and

6. create loving, supportive, celebratory community that can work to heal

the wounds inflicted by shame, internalized hatred, and fear, dealing with

the legacy that, as the Chickasaw poet Linda Hogan says, “history is our

illness.”73

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With the adoption of the name “Two Spirit,” we have already begun the

work of our lifetimes. As Sue-Ellen Jacobs, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang

write, “Using the word ‘Two-Spirit’ emphasizes the spiritual aspect of one’s life

and downplays the homosexual persona.”74 Significantly, this move announces and

enhances the Two-Spirit need for traditionally centered lives with the community’s

well-being at the center. Still, we face a great problem: the lack of knowledge or

spiritual training for GLBTQ Native people, particularly the mystery of blending

spiritual and sexual energies to manage death/rebirth. In traditional times, there

would have been older joyas to guide inexperienced ones; there would have been

ceremony, role modeling, community support, and, most importantly, there would

have been a clear role waiting to be filled.

The name Two-Spirit, then, is a way to alert others, and remind ourselves,

that we have a cultural and historical responsibility to the larger community: our

work is to attend to a balance of energies. We are still learning what this means;

there has been no one to teach us but ourselves, our research, our stories, and our

hearts. Maybe this will be the generation to figure it out. Maybe this will be the

generation to reclaim our inheritance within our communities. And if it is not, I

take heart from the history of the joyas, the impossibility of their true gendercide,

and the deep, passionate, mutual need for relationship between Two Spirits and

our communities.

notes

1. Paula Gunn Allen, “I Don’t Speak the Language That Has the Sentences: An Inter-

view with Paula Gunn Allen,” Sojourner: The Women’s Forum 24, no. 2 (1999):

26 – 27.

2. Paula Gunn Allen, “Some Like Indians Endure,” in Living the Spirit (New York: St.

Martin’s, 1988), 9 – 13.

3. Elaine Mills, ed., The Papers of John Peabody Harrington in the Smithsonian Institu-

tion, 1907 – 1957, microfilm (White Plains, NY: Kraus International, 1981).

4. Salvage ethnology is a term coined by Jacob Gruber to refer to the paradoxical obses-

sion of Westerners to collect artifacts, linguistic traces, and cultural knowledge of

cultures that they had previously spent much effort to colonize or exterminate. Rather

than basic ethnological research, the study of a culture, “salvage ethnology” was

concerned with an almost fanatic search (and often the hoarding of) any remains of

a colonized culture. See Jacob Gruber, “Ethnographic Salvage and the Shaping of

Anthropology,” American Anthropologist, n.s., 72 (1970): 1289 – 99.

5. I use this name as it was coined during the Third International Two Spirit Gather-

ing, to provide a positive alternative to the unacceptable term berdache: Two-Spirit

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people are “Aboriginal people who possess the sacred gifts of the female-male spirit,

which exists in harmony with those of the female and the male. They have traditional

respected roles within most Aboriginal cultures and societies and are contributing

members of the community. Today, some Aboriginal people who are Two-Spirit also

identify as being gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender” (“Background and Recent

Developments in Two-Spirit Organizing,” International Two Spirit Gathering, intltwo

spiritgathering.org/content/view/27/42/ [accessed July 28, 2009]).

6. The archaeology of sexuality refers to a fairly recent movement within archaeology

that brings together theoretical work from gender and women’s studies, science stud-

ies, philosophy, and the social sciences on sex and gender to study material remains

and to approach questions often considered accessible only through texts or direct

observation of behavior, such as gender or multiple genders. An excellent collection

of articles on this topic is Robert Schmidt and Barbara Voss, eds., Archaeologies of

Sexuality (London: Routledge, 2000).

7. My use of the term third gender relies on and refers back to work done by Will Ros-

coe, Sabine Lang, Wesley Thomas, Bea Medicine, and others as a way to identify a

gender that is neither fully male nor fully female, nor (more importantly) simply “half

and half,” but a unique blend of characteristics resulting in a third or other gender.

See Sue Ellen Jacobs, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang, eds., Two-Spirit People:

Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality (Urbana: University of

Illinois Press, 1997). As Brian Gilley summarizes, “The institution of the third gen-

der [in Native American precontact societies] was less about an individual’s sexual-

ity and more about the ways their special qualities were incorporated into the social

and religious life of their community” (Becoming Two-Spirit: Gay Identity and Social

Acceptance in Indian Country [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006], 11).

8. Father Gerónimo Boscana, a Franciscan priest who kept extensive notes about Native

culture and customs during his stay at Mission San Juan Capistrano from 1812 until

1826, wrote that the “Indians of California may be compared to a species of monkey”

(“Chinigchinich,” in Alfred Robinson, Life in California: During a Residence of Sev-

eral Years in That Territory, Comprising a Description of the Country and the Mis-

sionary Establishments, ed. Doyce B. Nunis Jr. [New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1846],

335). Postsecularization, perceptions had not changed much; in 1849 Samuel Upham

commented on California Indian genealogy and eating habits: “Like his brother, the

gorilla, he is a vegetarian and subsists principally on wild berries and acorns, occa-

sionally luxuriating on snails and grasshoppers” (Notes of a Voyage to California Via

Cape Horn, Together with Scenes in El Dorado, in the Years 1849 – 50 [New York:

Arno, 1973], 240). This attitude persisted when John Audubon wrote in his journal of

a Miwok child “eating [acorns] with the judgment of a monkey, and looking very much

like one.” Although the journal covers the years 1840 – 1850, it was published in

1906, perpetuating the distorted view of California Indians into the twentieth century

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(John Audubon, Audubon’s Western Journal: 1840 – 1850, ed. Frank Heywood Hod-

der [Cleveland: Clark, 1906], 213).

9. Although most scholars still use the population estimates by Martin Baumhoff (Eco-

logical Determinants of Aboriginal California Populations [Berkeley: University

of California Press, 1963]) and Sherburne Cook (The Population of the California

Indians, 1796 – 1970 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976]), many con-

temporary scholars view their numbers (150,000 – 350,000) as greatly outdated. In

American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History since 1492 (Norman:

University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), Russell Thornton, for example, writes that Cal-

ifornia Indian precontact population was “approaching 705,000” (200). In private

correspondence with the author about more current population data, William Preston

writes that “at this point I think Thornton’s high number is totally reasonable. In fact,

keeping in mind that populations no doubt fluctuated over time, I’m thinking that

at times 1 million or more Native Californians were resident in that state.” William

Preston, e-mail message to author, July 8, 2009.

10. Pedro Fages, A Historical, Political, and Natural Description of California by Pedro

Fages, Soldier of Spain, trans. Herbert Priestley (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1937), 33.

11. Stanley Coren, The Pawprints of History: Dogs and the Course of Human Events (New

York: Free Press, 2003), 67 – 80.

12. Coren, Pawprints of History, 76.

13. Coren, Pawprints of History, 72 – 73.

14. Coren, Pawprints of History, 74.

15. Peter Martyr d’Anghera, “The Third English Book on America” [De Orbe Novo],

trans. Richard Eden, in The First Three English Books on America: [?1511] – 1555

A.D., ed. Edward Arber (Birmingham, 1885), 138.

16. Coren, Pawprints of History, 76.

17. Maureen Heibert, “ ‘Too Many Cides’ to Genocide Studies? Review of Jones, Adam,

ed. Gendercide and Genocide,” H-Genocide, H-Net Reviews, www.h-net.org/reviews/

showrev.php?id=10878 (accessed December 17, 2008); emphasis added.

18. D’Anghera, “Third English Book on America,” 138.

19. Herbert E. Bolton, trans. and ed., Fray Juan Crespi: Missionary Explorer on the

Pacific Coast (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1927), 171.

20. Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1991), 83.

21. Wayne Dynes, “Gay Spanish,” Homolexis, December 25, 2006, homolexis.blogspot

.com/2006_12_01_archive.html.

22. Fages, Historical, Political, and Natural Description of California, 59.

23. Francisco Palóu, Palóu’s Life of Fray Junipero Serra, ed. and trans. Maynard J. Gei-

ger (Washington, DC: American Academy of Franciscan History, 1955), 33.

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24. Leanne Hinton, Flutes of Fire: Essays on California Indian Languages (Berkeley:

Heyday, 1994), 13.

25. Boscana, “Chinigchinich,” 284.

26. Connie M. Toops, Hummingbirds: Jewels in Flight (Stillwater, MN: Voyageur, 1992),

15.

27. James Sandos, “Christianization among the Chumash: An Ethnohistoric Perspective,”

American Indian Quarterly 15 (1991): 71.

28. Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez, Spanish and Indian Place Names of California: Their

Meaning and Their Romance (San Francisco: Robertson, 1914), 44.

29. Huntington Library, “Early California Population Project Database, 2006” (ECPPD),

www.huntington.org/Information/ECPPmain.htm (accessed September 30, 2007).

30. ECPPD, Santa Barbara, Baptismal #04128.

31. ECPPD, San Jose, Baptism #04733.

32. ECPPD, San Francisco Solano, Baptism #00977.

33. Sandos, “Christianization among the Chumash,” 71.

34. Irving Berdine Richman, California under Spain and Mexico, 1535 – 1847 (White-

fish, MT: Kessinger, 2007), 442; emphasis added.

35. Boscana, “Chinigchinich,” 245.

36. Palóu, Palóu’s Life of Fray Junipero Serra, 214 – 15.

37. For a general survey, see Jacobs, Thomas, and Lang, Two-Spirit People; and Will

Roscoe, Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America (New

York: St. Martin’s, 1998).

38. J. Alden Mason writes, “That the mention of the dead was as serious an offence

among the Salinans as with other Californian Indians is well illustrated by the inci-

dent that when asked jocularly for a Salinan word of profanity, Pedro Encinales gave

ca MteL and translated it ‘go to the devil’ (ve al diablo). [Father] Sitjar writes chavmtel

‘cadaver.’ ” Sitjar, who compiled a useful list of Salinan words and phrases, knew

enough of the Indian language to make his own translation, which apparently Pedro

Encinales, the indigenous speaker, wasn’t comfortable speaking (J. Alden Mason, The

Ethnology of the Salinan Indians [Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2006], 167).

39. Sandra E. Hollimon, “Archaeology of the ’Aqi: Gender and Sexuality in Prehistoric

Chumash Society,” in Archaeologies of Sexuality, ed. Robert Schmidt and Barbara

Voss (New York: Routledge, 2000), 193.

40. Holliman, “Archaeology of the ’Aqi,” 192.

41. Holliman, “Archaeology of the ’Aqi,” 182.

42. Palóu, Palóu’s Life of Fray Junipero Serra, 193.

43. Palóu, Palóu’s Life of Fray Junipero Serra, 445.

44. Linda B. King, The Medea Creek Cemetery (CA-LAN-243): An Investigation of Social

Organization from Mortuary Practices, UCLA Archaeological Survey Annual Report,

no. 11 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), 47. I call Solares a “con-

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282 GLQ: a JoUrnaL of LEsBian and Gay stUdiEs

sultant” here rather than use the traditional ethnological term informant out of respect

for all Native peoples who have retained and chosen to share their cultural knowledge

and expertise; my purpose is to acknowledge that Indigenous knowledge puts Native

consultants on an equal intellectual level with scientists and academics.

45. Hollimon suggests that “daughters” of male-bodied ’aqi were probably fictive kinships

(such as adoption) formed with other members of the same guild or role or premeno-

pausal children of women who took up the ’aqi role late in life, and when colonization

had created a shortage in the usual mortuary profession (Holliman, “Archaeology of

the ’Aqi,” 185).

46. For information about the life expectancy of mission-born children, see Robert H.

Jackson and Edward Castillo, Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization: The

Impact of the Mission System on California Indians (Albuquerque: University of New

Mexico Press, 1995), 53 – 56.

47. Walter L. Williams, “The Abominable Sin: The Spanish Campaign against ‘Sodomy,’

and the Results in Modern Latin America,” in The Spirit and the Flesh (Boston: Bea-

con, 1992), 129.

48. Williams, “Abominable Sin,” 130.

49. Williams, “Abominable Sin,” 129.

50. For a fascinating study of Librado’s history, see John Johnson, “The Trail to Fer-

nando,” Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology 4 (1982): 132 – 38.

51. Fernando Librado, Breath of the Sun: Life in Early California as Told by a Chumash

Indian, Fernando Librado, to John P. Harringon, ed. Travis Hudson (Banning, CA:

Malki Museum Press, 1979).

52. Librado, Breath of the Sun, 33.

53. Librado, Breath of the Sun, 33.

54. See King, Medea Creek Cemetery, 47. Hollimon says that “her identification may have

been an intended insult based on personal animosity” (“Archaeology of the ’Aqi,”

192).

55. Mills, Papers of John Peabody Harrington, 73:282 B.

56. Multiple translations of joto exist: for example, faggot, queer, homosexual, pansy. After

consultation with colleagues, I believe I have chosen the word most likely to carry

Isabel’s meaning.

57. Isabel’s older half-brother Jacinto Meadows (San Carlos, Baptism #04279), a son from

her mother’s first marriage to Quirino (San Carlos, Baptism #02993X), married my

great-great-great-grandmother Sacramento Cantua (San Carlos, Baptism #04202). As

Jacinto’s baptismal information lists no surname, it seems that Jacinto adopted the

Meadows name when his mother married Englishman James Meadows in 1842. Sac-

ramento and Jacinto, both previously married, had no children together; hence, this is

a familial, not blood, relationship.

58. ECPPD, San Carlos, Baptism #04700.

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59. “Real” was a name conferred by common community use on Estefana and her sisters,

probably because of their association with Padre Jose Real, a well-known womanizer;

his women were known as the “Real women” and mothers of the “Real children.”

Even their father, Fructoso Real Cholom, acquired and used the Real name.

60. Steven Hackel, Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis: Indian-Spanish

Relations in Colonial California, 1769 – 1850 (Chapel Hill: University of North Caro-

lina Press, 2005), 388.

61. Hackel, Children of Coyote, 401.

62. Estefana’s “muchos maridos” — her many husbands and/or men — look quite differ-

ent from this perspective. Rather than being a bad Indian woman who slept around

a lot, a sinner, or a lewd and loose woman, as the priests saw her, Estefana was actu-

ally practicing a very California Indian form of resistance and cultural preservation:

maintaining her right to choose her sexual partners and bear children by the men she

preferred regardless of Catholic marriage ceremony. Hurtado notes that Father Serra

recognized early on that “common Indian sexual behavior amounted to serious sins

that merited the friar’s solemn condemnation” (Albert Hurtado, Intimate Frontiers:

Sex, Gender, and Culture in Old California [Albuquerque: University of New Mexico

Press, 1999], 6). Worst of all, of course, were the joyas, but normative men and women

were a close second, practicing premarital sex, polygamy for higher-status men, serial

monogamy for everyone else (in which marriage and divorce were both accomplished

quickly and without “legal” or spiritual repercussions), the taking of lovers while

married to someone else (which had its own risks and costs but was not forbidden),

the restrictions preventing sexual relations for up to two years after childbirth or a

day or two before hunting, acceptance of masturbation, birth control, and so on. It

seems to me that Estefana was resisting the countless rules, punishments, pressures,

and basic colonization methods of the Spaniards via her woman’s body. Therefore it

is possible she would have had fewer issues with her son’s status as a joto than many

and may have even seen his sexual orientation as Victor’s own form of resistance and

self-fulfillment.

63. This field note, in transcription, was generously shared with me by Philip Laverty. It

reads in full: “76:37B [Iz. May 36; Victor Acedo, el cosinero de Esnáyvli [Snively],

used to put up aulones in frascos (mason jars); mussels, clams].”

64. L. Frank Manriquez, Acorn Soup (Berkeley, CA: Heyday, 1999); L. Frank Manriquez

and Kim Hogeland, eds., First Families: A Photographic History of California Indians

(Berkeley, CA: Heyday, 2007).

65. L. Frank Manriquez, “There Are Other Ways of Getting Tradition,” Museum Anthro-

pology 24, nos. 2/3 (2001): 41.

66. Manriquez, “There Are Other Ways of Getting Tradition,” 41; emphasis added.

67. Manriquez, “There Are Other Ways of Getting Tradition,” 42.

68. Manriquez, “There Are Other Ways of Getting Tradition,” 42.

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69. Manriquez, “There Are Other Ways of Getting Tradition,” 43.

70. L. Frank Manriquez, e-mail message to author, December 21, 2008.

71. Janice Gould, “American Indian Women’s Poetry: Strategies of Rage and Hope,”

SIGNS: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 20 (1995): 799. Gould’s essay dis-

cusses poetry by eight Native women (Paula Gunn Allen, Luci Tapahonso, Janice

Gould, Wendy Rose, Chrystos, Louise Erdrich, Linda Hogan, and Joy Harjo), four

of whom have primary relationships with women as life partners, including Gould

herself. I find this significant in light of the “exhumation” Gould speaks of; she also

calls this “our imperative . . . to resurrect, sometimes hundreds of years after the fact,

a history that has been buried, lost, or ignored” (799). As Gould’s work points out, the

liminal states of birth and death are strangely connected twins, whose mediators are

often Two-Spirit people and women.

72. Other indigenous peoples around the world attributed special powers and rights to

Two-Spirits within their tribes; although they were not always the mediators between

life and death, similar patterns may be found. Because of the limitations of this essay,

I leave that to future scholars and seekers.

73. Linda Hogan, The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir (New York:

Norton, 2001), 59.

74. Jacobs, Thomas, and Lang, Two-Spirit People, 3.

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